


Different than Adam & Eve

by firebirdschild



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Leverage
Genre: Bisexuality, Community: queer_fest, Gen, Headcanon, Religion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-26
Updated: 2013-04-26
Packaged: 2017-12-09 07:56:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/771863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firebirdschild/pseuds/firebirdschild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will thinking of herself as queer make her feel less broken? Will it help to tell other people?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Different than Adam & Eve

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Telaryn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Telaryn/gifts).



> Author’s Note: Written for Dreamwidth's QueerFest 2013. With a little tip of the hat to [Telaryn](http://telaryn.livejournal.com) and [Hickumu](http://hickumu.livejournal.com)’s _[“The Ties That Bind”](http://theroadhouse.dreamwidth.org/15889.html#cutid1)_ ‘verse. Because their Buffy/Leverage crossover world has always been such an amazingly well created read.

_Damned priests, they’re always trying to make you think about something you can’t change._ Faith cursed silently as she let herself fall back carelessly onto her bunk.

Father Nate hadn’t been the one to push her into it; no, that had been the public defender assigned to her most recent parole hearing. _”Go join the priest’s support group. It’ll look good on your appeal. And with your record, you’re gonna need it.”_ Unfortunately, the man might be a pathetic little milquetoast but he was right; Faith hadn’t exactly been a model prisoner. She was going to have to straighten up and fly right if she ever hoped to get the hell out of this hole. 

Correction; Psychiatric Rehabilitation Center. The Belmont Hospital for Psychiatric Treatment and Rehabilitation, to be specific.

The place she’d been sentenced to instead of prison or juvie. Faith admitted to herself that actually she had it pretty good here. It beat the pants off the most recent foster home she’d been placed in. And it was a damned sight better than the women’s correctional facility that the prosecutor had threatened her with. But that had been after she’d spit in his face at the sentencing hearing. At that point, the judge had just been eager to get one Faith Lehane - no good juvenile and professional little girl lost - out of his courtroom. And it was an election year, after all. 

Ten months and more weeks spent medicated-out-of-her-head in solitary confinement than she had fingers to count on, Faith trudged begrudgingly to her first meeting with the good Father. She was doing it because the public defender had said it would look good on her parole hearing. That didn’t mean she had to like it. Hell and Mary but she didn’t like it.

People of faith (the irony of using that particular word definitely wasn’t lost on her) had always made her uncomfortable. A small part of it was their pious ability to “rise above”, “turn the other cheek”, be holier-than-thou. But more than that, what she couldn’t stand was the ways in which they always lied. “God is watching over you.” “God has plans for you.” “God wants you to be good.” 

God, Mary, Jesus. None of them gave a rat’s ass about one Faith Elenore Lehane. She knew. She’d prayed fervently to all of them when she was a little girl. It hadn’t helped. Her mother had still fallen into the bottom of a bottle and never come up for air again. And her father, well, when her mother had been too drunk to pull her weight, he’d simply expected Faith to take her place. But she was just a child. And even the most competent of five year olds can’t be expected to manage more than making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich without it turning into a disaster. Faith had been ten years old when the pot roast she’d been making for dinner burned the house down. In the aftermath of the fire, her father had disappeared and never come back again. 

_And good riddance to you too, dad,_ she thought, staring up at the acoustic tiles barely held by their adhesive to the ceiling above her bed. As much as the foster homes she’d stayed in had been tacitly neglectful at best, getting out of the twisted relationship with her father had been one of the best things to have happened thus far in fourteen years of a life lived hard. 

“Damned priests, she thought yet again, closing her eyes against the never-ending brightness of the florescent lights. Only this time there was far less venom behind the thought. Because she couldn’t un-think the thoughts that this priest had put inside her head. And for once, someone else’s thoughts had made sense on a level far too deep for Faith’s comfort. God only knew why (and oh how the irony of that wasn’t lost on her) but this priest, this Father Nate, he’d walked straight through the emotional walls Faith had begun building the first time her father had laid a hand on her. He’d crawled beneath her skin, snuck inside her head. He’d seen the self-loathing she’d tried to hide behind all of her rage and violence and known it for what it was. And _that_ scared Faith far more than the hell the priests had preached at the church she’d attended with her mother as a child. This all too approachable priest, with his mop of unruly dark curls, he _knew_ her, knew the original sin that lay in the depths of her heart, and he, he thought it to be forgivable.

_”There is nothing wrong with you, Faith. You’ve always been this way, haven’t you? Your father, sick and perverted as his actions were, didn’t turn you into this thing you fear. Yes there are many who would say that you are damned to hell. Damned for loving differently than Adam and Eve. But what sort of God would make so many people just like you with love in their hearts, and then damn you simply because the love you feel encompasses variations never written of by His disciples? No,” he’d said, eyes steady as he watched her, waiting for some unknown signal, “God loves you just as you are, Faith. Regardless of whether you love men, women, or both. Now maybe if He can love you the way you are then you should try doing so as well?”_

Damn him. Damn Father Nate to the hell he seemed so certain was that it not her fate to claim. Because Faith didn’t know if she could live without that fire in her gut. It’d been the only thing keeping her warm for so long. There was no way in hell she’d ever admit it to the damned priest, but inside the echoing silence of her own head Faith knew; that fire, that rage, was the only thing protecting her, keeping her from crumbling to dust. Without it, she would be nothing. And if there was one thing that Faith knew, it was this; she was born for a reason. She was meant for something. Without the fire, what she was meant to be was unknown. And the unknown was still a very big and very scary thing. Just as it had been the day her mother died.


End file.
